Have Books, Will Travel
What books do you pack when you travel? Is it a nightmare trying to fit all of them into your carry-on? Or are you the lucky, simpler type? The type who can grab whatever is on your nightstand, stuff it in your backpack, and jet?
Me: I used to have a disorder. If it was shelved on my bookcase, it was going with me. I’m not joking. Once, when my brother and I traveled to Wisconsin to visit my grandma and aunt for three weeks, I packed three or four dozen books. The whole Judy Blume oeuvre. All the mysteries the Boxcar Children could solve. I didn’t have enough clothes, but I had literature for months. (I was also a slow reader.)
How many did I actually read?
Not a single fucking one.
I just liked the reassurance that came with having them all on me. I knew that, should the urge strike, I could read anything. What if I wanted Superfudge, and it wasn’t there? Honestly, that was the greatest apocalypse my little eight-year-old mind could imagine.
Over the years, I’ve gotten better, if only mildly so. My carry-on typically fits my laptop, a long book, a short book, a journal, and poetry if I’m feeling optimistic. Then, right before I board the plane, I buy a copy of Food & Wine, because who the hell can read on the plane? Gunter Grass doesn’t do shit to calm me through turbulence, but recipes and features on the natural wine industry? Calming as Xanax.
All this is meant as prelude to my recent dilemma: How does a writer pack books for a four-week residency?
The question appears similar to “What books would you bring to a desert island?” Though the lists do overlap, the reasoning behind them is quite different. On a desert island, I’d want my faves. The ones that entertain endlessly, that hold up to repetition and bring back all the joys of the civilization I just left behind.
For residencies, though, I prefer my “desk books,” the ones that I keep at arm’s length. The ones I can flip through and find inspiration on any page. The best of this category is one with a voice that doesn’t infect my own. What books do I love but have to leave at home? Anything by George Saunders. Love CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, but I always find myself writing like him whenever I read it for extended periods. Also, a new favorite, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Try it. Two pages in, and you’ll write like Lucy Marsden too.
I’ll be featuring some of the books here that I did decide to bring along: my current roster of desk books. I’d hoped to post this before I left, but the timing didn’t work out. Hopefully, in doing this, I don’t discover I’ve made some huge mistake in bringing an overly influential book with me. If that’s the case, back in the suitcase it’ll go until it’s time to leave.
Have Books, Will Travel. Part One
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece is one of the overlapping books. I’d bring it to residencies, islands, conferences, the moon, the sea floor, and heaven. It goes everywhere with me. Why? Not only is it a joy to read and reread–the story is so sprawling it feels new every single time–it’s an endless source of inspiration. Garcia Marquez does everything, and he does it beautifully. Write about an oversized dong? He’s done it. Train of corpses? Done it. Paparazzi of butterflies? Done it.
I also love to keep any book around that’s set in a small town. Macondo, for me, is the prototype for my Helix. I hope to make something much different, but there’s no better model than this one.
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You sound like a Kindle advertisement, Mike! I use books to escape when I travel (which is usually for business). I limit myself to one book per day I will be gone with a max of six.
I usually take something like A Sportsman’s Notebook by Turgenev (because it has a ton of stories of all different types), a longer book that I’ve put off reading (Gurganus’ Confederate Widow is a prime suspect), two or three books of poetry (one might be an anthology), a short book I want to read and maybe some magazines. I also have a big array of audiobooks on my ipod. Since wikipedia has made it unnecessary to haul reference books around things have gotten a lot easier.
jessie bought me a nook for graduation. she got tired of having to carry the suitcase full of books i take everywhere. she reassured me i could still buy as many real books as before, and now i’m kind of a convert. i feel so peaceful knowing that in the middle of any emergency, all of my die-without-them books are right in my bag.
I like your strategy–and your math–Josh. I’ve never really thought about it in terms of what I could actually accomplish. I sort of assume that I won’t finish any book while I’m traveling, and I assume that on any given day I could be in the mood for 47 different novels/collections/magazines. Of course, that never happens.
And as far as Kindle goes, you’ll never see me buying one of those. I state for the record: I’m in no way affiliated with amazon.com and have no interest in helping them sell there shitty e-reader. One day, I’ll probably own an iPad, but that’s only so I can pretend that I’m in a Star Trek episode. As great as Apple’s implementation of the e-reading software is, I never want to read on anything but paper.
Vero,
Hmmm, I just denounced e-readers in my previous note to Josh, but your point is hard to argue against. For some reason I was thinking that electronic copies necessarily had to replace paper copies. They don’t, at least for now. For now, we can buy both, enjoy the comfort of the feel and the weight while we’re at home, and then the relief of packing light and saving our signifigant others the trouble of hauling our literature everywhere.